Alberto left for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. He started by going on a blitz in another thread scoring just about everyone "off-topic." He felt the thread was off-topic and moderated the first message off-topic: I have no problem with that, that's what the scoring system is for. But then he went on and started scoring all the messages he could in the thread as "off-topic". That's an abuse of the system or, at best, a complete misunderstanding of how the system should work.

I didnt have the idea of what exactly Alberto did. From his last post he appeared innocent. Thanks for the details, what he didnt wasnt right.

Now if we change the karma system so that messages are scored but users have no overall score, will the karma system have any effect on encouraging good posts and discouraging useless ones? I don't know. A lot of people supposedly don't care about their karma score anyway--which is surprising since so many people seem to have a lot of issues with a score that supposedly doesn't matter to them.

It seems most of the members dont really care about their Karma. If all cared why would we at all see flames and troll. Secondly IMHO this forum is a team work and in a team work like this its no use having individual ranking or scoring. Karma / Scoring for messages is fine as it indicates the usefulness of the message to the reader. Is it possible to have a voting system for taking decision on such issues :). You can put up the issue for voting and members can vote for their opinion.

We do try to enforce the rules fairly but it's also a judgement call every single time. We're not perfect and we might not always get it right and others may disagree with us from time to time; I don't think there's anything we can do about that. Anytime a decision has to be made, there will be people that disagree with that decision--especially when there are 10,000+ watching.

I agree its not possible to make all the members agree with one decision. But when it comes to forum rules I still believe all the members are not treated equally.

It is related to 8052s in the context that many of us that work with 8052s are consultants and could run into the exact same situation. It's certainly more on-topic than many of the "WEOT's" we have and tolerate from time to time.

Steve didnt mention he trip was related to 8052 ARM or PIC and thus certainly off topic.
http://www.8052.com/forum/read.phtml?id=97656According to Rule # 3 ON-TOPIC. All messages posted to the forum must be on-topic. "On-topic" means the message must be related in some meaningful way to the 8052 microcontroller and derivatives, or to the community of developers that work with them. If you are posting a message that doesn't clearly specify how it is related to the 8052 microcontroller please take the time to explain how you are using an 8052 in your project in relation to the message you are posting.

You say that "lots of posts are deleted/blocked because they are off-topic." I'd say that's incorrect.

I agree, My mistake Only a few posts are deleted/blocked. And I also agree that 99% of deleted/closed threads deserve closure.